[WORLD_ENDS_SOON]

"Online learning" is actually a pretty established term in theoretical computer science and specifically learning theory. I don't think that it's meant to be misleading at all but rather to connect the work to the extensive previous work on this subject. "Online" is used in general in theoretical computer science to describe problems where data arrives in a stream and the algorithm has to make decisions as it observes the data (e.g. before observing all the data). There are "online" versions of just about every problem in theoretical computer science. For example, there are "online traveling salesman" and "online facility location" problems both of which have published research. "Online" obviously has a different meaning outside of computer science, but it conveys a very specific meaning in the math / computer theory context. I'm not sure when this term first appeared in research, but this line of work is often traced back to the 50s with the perceptron algorithm, David Blackwell, and James Hannan.

[jrumbut]

It's getting even more difficult though because now there is a quickly growing body of research into the effectiveness of the instructional kind of online learning, including for computer science and machine learning pedagogy.

Definitely some SEO issues even in peer reviewed research databases.